Panty

by Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay. Translated by Arunava Sinha

A woman arrives alone in Kolkata, taking refuge in a deserted apartment while she waits to undergo an unspecified surgery. In this disorienting city, everything seems new and strange: the pavement-dwellers outside her block, the collective displays of religiosity, the power cuts and alarming acts of arson. Her sense of identity already shaken, when she finds a stained pair of leopard print panties in the otherwise-empty wardrobe she begins to fantasise about their former owner, whose imagined life comes to blur with and overlap her own.

Pairing manic energy with dark eroticism, Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay’s writing has a surreal, feverish quality, slipping between fluid subjects with great stylistic daring. Credited with being ‘the woman who reintroduced hardcore sexuality into Bengali literature’, Bandyopadhyay is neither superficial nor sensationalistic, equally concerned with debates on religion and nationhood as with gender and sexuality.

Press

‘An unnerving, ominous and beautiful meditation on the loneliness of modern life.’ — The Guardian

‘Vivid, beguiling, passionate, and never less than urgent, with Panty, India has found its Ferrante. You must read this book.’ — Niven Govinden, author of All the Days and Nights

‘Delightfully subversive.’ — Joanna Walsh, author of Vertigo

ISBN

9781911284000

Publication Date

June 2016

Link

Panty on the Tilted Axis website